Zorro
Zorro's JournalNurse Carefully Weighs Whether She Better Off Getting Vaccine Or Losing Job And Dying
UTICA, NY—Blasting state officials for putting her into such an “impossible position,” local nurse Sophia Wood confirmed Wednesday that she was carefully weighing whether she was better off getting the vaccine or losing her job and dying.
“On the plus side, if get vaccinated, I could get to continue to live my life healthy and happy with no drawbacks, but is that really worth giving up the right to die while out of work?” said the healthcare worker, who had spent the past weeks agonizing over a long list of pros and cons of getting vaccinated that she had written up for each side of the issue.
“On one hand, I have way more items listed under the pros column, like ‘keep job,’ ‘protect others,’ and ‘protect myself,’ but on the other, I have ‘freedom’ written in big red letters, circled, and underlined multiple times. I’m pretty torn between the two. Who would issue such a cruel ultimatum?”
At press time, Wood assured herself that regardless of the choice she ultimately made, she would wind up back in the hospital.
https://www.theonion.com/nurse-carefully-weighs-whether-she-better-off-getting-v-1847768107
As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a 'worst-case scenario' for the country
A year before the 2020 election, about two dozen constitutional scholars and democracy advocates traveled to Washington to work through a range of scenarios where something goes awry on Election Day.
The country’s political system was being tested by a campaign like no other in modern history, with an incumbent president, Donald Trump, who showed little regard for the democratic traditions and constitutional norms that had guided his predecessors — and who repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through rampant fraud.
So the group considered a slew of hypothetical catastrophes: “What do we do if a vigilante group takes over a major county tabulation facility and burns it to the ground? What do we do if there is a military coup?” But, as Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund tells it, the experts were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States.
“Either we were not creative enough or the norms of civility our nation has seen over centuries were not reliable enough,” said Patrick, a former elections official in Maricopa County, Ariz.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-trump-hints-at-2024-comeback-democracy-advocates-fear-a-worst-case-scenario-for-the-country/2021/09/28/ee357558-1a47-11ec-914a-99d701398e5a_story.html
GOP Stalls Government Funding Bill By Detonating 50 Tons Of Explosives Inside Capitol Building
WASHINGTON—In a maneuver that experts suggest could represent a significant setback for the legislative ambitions of Democrats, the GOP reportedly stalled an upcoming government funding bill Tuesday by detonating fifty tons of C-4 explosives inside the Capitol building.
“This was a make-or-break week for Democrats, and the complete destruction of both Congressional chambers alongside the death of several sitting progressives is just going to make passing the Biden agenda even harder,” said political expert Andrew Srinivasan, describing the decision by House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to plant and detonate 100,000 pounds of plastic explosives under the legislature as both a “cunning political move” and a major blow to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
“It’s hard to imagine how President Biden will address climate change or Medicare expansion after a crucial vote like [Rep. Mike] Quigley was immolated in the resulting blast. Frankly, the coordination required to blow up the Rotunda alone shows how much better Republicans are at marching in lockstep and toeing party lines.”
At press time, several pundits had praised the Republicans for their restraint in avoiding the nuclear option of obliterating Washington D.C. with a tactical warhead.
https://www.theonion.com/gop-stalls-government-funding-bill-by-detonating-50-ton-1847755034
The pandemic didn't have to be politicized. One party is to blame for it.
One day, the coronavirus pandemic will be over, even though that might seem like a far-off fantasy. There’s some reason to believe the delta variant has peaked, even though the United States is still averaging around 2,000 deaths per day, and if we’re lucky, we may be able to say in a year or so that it has receded to the point where it no longer determines the contours of our daily lives.
But none of us will avoid having our perspective on our country, the world and our relations to one another shaped by this long, dark period. When it’s over, we can’t forget what it taught us. And who it revealed people to be.
We have to remember that this was, above all, the politicized pandemic. And it didn’t have to be that way.
Consider this remarkable statistic from analyst Charles Gaba: In the bluest counties, since the beginning of July there have been approximately 9 covid-19 deaths per 100,000 population. In the reddest counties, there have been 47 deaths per 100,000 population.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/27/pandemic-didnt-have-be-politicized-one-party-is-blame-it/
Trump Claims He Won German Election
PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—Urging the German people to “stop the steal,” Donald J. Trump claimed that he was elected Chancellor of Germany over the weekend.
Trump said that, once the official vote tallies have been recounted, it will be clear that he won the German election by a “landslide.”
Reflecting on his purported win, Trump said, “I’ve always wanted to be the Chancellor of Germany. That’s a title that’s been held by some very fine people.”
He revealed that he planned to send the former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani to Germany to contest the election results. “He hasn’t been disbarred there yet,” Trump said.
For his part, Giuliani said that he relished his latest mission on Trump’s behalf. “I can’t wait to get to Germany,” he said. “When does Oktoberfest start?”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-claims-he-won-german-election
Not much of a pro football fan
but today's Chargers-Chiefs and Packers-49ers games were pretty damn good.
Last second wins by the visiting teams created quite a lot of drama at the end.
An elections supervisor embraced conspiracy theories. Officials say she has become an insider threat
In April, employees in the office that runs elections in western Colorado’s Mesa County received an unusual calendar invitation for an after-hours work event, a gathering at a hotel in Grand Junction. “Expectations are that all will be at the Doubletree by 5:30,” said the invite sent by a deputy to Tina Peters, the county’s chief elections official.
Speaking at the DoubleTree was Douglas Frank, a physics teacher and scientist who was rapidly becoming famous among election deniers for claiming to have discovered secret algorithms used to rig the 2020 contest against Donald Trump. Frank led the crowd in a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and spent the next 90 minutes alleging an elaborate conspiracy involving inflated voter rolls, fraudulent ballots and a “sixth-order polynomial,” video of the event shows. He was working for MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, he said, and their efforts could overturn President Biden’s victory.
Being told to sit through a presentation of wild, debunked claims was “a huge slap in the face,” one Mesa County elections-division employee said of the previously unreported episode. “We put so much time and effort into making sure that everything’s done accurately,” the employee told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Peters, the elected county clerk, had expressed sympathy for such theories in the past, the employee said.
Over the course of the past month, in a lawsuit filed by the state’s top elections official, Peters and her deputy have been accused of sneaking someone into the county elections offices to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines. Those copies later surfaced online and in the hands of election deniers. The local district attorney, state prosecutors and the FBI are investigating whether criminal charges are warranted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/an-elections-supervisor-embraced-conspiracy-theories-officials-say-she-has-become-an-insider-threat/2021/09/26/ee60812e-1a17-11ec-a99a-5fea2b2da34b_story.html
Mortgage Lender Cut Corners in Echo of 2008 Crisis, Ex-Executive Says
A lawsuit by its former operations chief says that as loanDepot prepared to go public, its founder pushed workers to approve mortgages without documentation.LoanDepot, one of the mortgage industry’s biggest nonbank lenders, was riding a boom.
Historically low interest rates last year sent residential loan refinancings to their highest level in well over a decade. And thanks to an aggressive sales push, loanDepot made $100 billion in loans, a company record.
But in its eagerness to grow before an initial public offering early this year, loanDepot illegally cut corners and processed thousands of loans without required documents such as employment and income verifications, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by one of its former top executives.
The allegations by Tammy Richards, loanDepot’s former chief operations officer, echo some of the abuses that fueled the mortgage meltdown in 2008, which led to extensive new industry regulations. Ms. Richards, who was a midlevel executive at one of the most notorious firms during the crisis, said in her suit that she had been forced out of her job at loanDepot for refusing to break the rules.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/business/loandepot-lawsuit-Anthony-Hsieh.html
Lin Wood's Ex-Partners Say He's a Fraudster. His Emails May Prove It
Lin Wood agreed to pay his ex-partners an undisclosed amount from former Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann’s settlements. But Wood’s emails allegedly tell another story.Embattled pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood could soon be in even more legal hot water, following allegations by former law partners that he lied to a judge and covered up a scheme to steal their share of settlements involving former Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann.
Making matters worse for Wood, his one-time partners say he wrote the alleged scheme down in a series of late-night emails—documents they now have.
While Wood made his name as a lawyer for people like falsely accused Atlanta Olympics bombing suspect Richard Jewell, he’s since faced a series of professional setbacks after pivoting toward hunting vaporous evidence of “voter fraud” and promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
In August, a federal judge in Michigan referred Wood, Sidney Powell, and other lawyers involved in a 2020 election case to their state bars for potential suspension or disbarment, and ordered them to pay legal fees that could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wood is already facing an unrelated potential disbarment in his home state of Georgia after refusing to take a mental-health exam.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/lin-woods-ex-partners-say-hes-a-fraudster-his-emails-may-prove-it
Mitch McConnell needs to stop playing games with the debt ceiling
Hysteria, like controversy, is usually a manufactured phenomenon in Washington. But when it comes to the increasingly vocal worry that Congress will not raise the debt ceiling, the hysteria is real and warranted. This is no arcane exercise in wonkery. All of us and the global economy will be in for a world of hurt if Congress fails to act.
“My advice to this Democratic government, the president, the House and Senate: Don’t play Russian roulette with our economy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday. “Step up and raise the debt ceiling and cover all that you’ve been engaged in all year long.”
That’s not how any of this works. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote to House Democrats last weekend, “The debt limit is a shared responsibility, and I urge Congress to come together, in that spirit, on a bipartisan basis as it has in the past to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
That bipartisanship is crucial, as it’s usually how any move on the debt ceiling proceeds. Which makes McConnell’s Wednesday statement ridiculous, especially considering that just two days before, he declared that Democrats “will not get Senate Republicans’ help with raising the debt limit.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/25/mitch-mcconnell-republicans-stop-playing-games-debt-ceiling/
McConnell's blatant hypocrisy is particularly galling. It is appalling that someone in his position of authority would work actively to destroy the democratic foundations of very government he was elected to serve. He is no patriot; he is the leader of a party of traitors to this country.
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